The Tarzan Novels THE TARZAN NOVELS Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) wrote over one hundred novels and short stories between 1911 and 1940. Despite his profuse output and undisputed popular appeal he was ostrasiced by the literary community because he chose to operate within the realm of pulp fiction. He wrote to entertain and, unapologetically, to earn a living. His greatest creation, Tarzan, the savage ape-man, appeared in twenty-four Tarzan novels, two "juvenile" Tarzan stories, and one unfinished Tarzan manuscript. ERB's writing style was frequently criticised for the over reliance on pure coincidence to drive the plot, the tiresome reoccurrence of some themes, the stereotypical and caricaturish nature of some of his figures, and the lack of polish and control of language (Atamian & Boerst). He was, however, without a doubt, the most widely read American author of the first half of the twentieth century. His works appeared in over thirty languages and conservative estimates credit him with selling over thirty million books (generous estimates say sixty million).

All of Ed's stories, especially the Tarzans, address the theme of the survival of the fittest. ERB was a product of his times and like so many of his contemporaries he believed in a heirarchy of race and class and was very proud of his nearly pure Anglo-Saxon lineage (Taliafero & Porges). He gave to the world a noble hero who had mastery over a brutal and primal world. Tarzan was an absolutist with unflinching standards who knew right from wrong and was willing to sacrifice himself for the cause he had devoted himself to (Atamian). In this respect Burroughs writing spoke to ordinary people living in an ordinary world in the very same way that the hero myths have always touched the hearts of men and women. Tarzan inspired them to be more than they are. And the fact that the tales were delivered in the exhilarating, pulse-quickening language of a master story teller kept readers coming back for more, year after year. It should be stressed for the uninitiated, however, that the savage, violent and richly imaginative world of the Tarzan novels is a far cry from the formulaic, mellower approach of the family-focused Tarzan films .

The list below contains the twenty-four Tarzan stories written by ERB and the book produced from the unfinished manuscript after his death. It does not contain the two juvenile novels, The Tarzan Twins , which was published in 1927, and Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins with Jad-Bal-Ja, the Golden Lion , published in 1936. These works are of a different nature to those listed here. The dates used are the date that the work was first published as a book, not the date of its first appearance in a magazine. These pages attempt to give some idea of the circumstances in which ERB wrote each of the Tarzan stories. The vivid plot descriptions are taken word-for-word from the back cover blurbs of the Ballantine paperbacks. I definitely couldn't have improved on these gems. 1914 Tarzan Forever Tarzan Forever The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan By JOHN TALIAFERRO Read the Review The Sum of the Parts "If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor," Edgar Rice Burroughs lectured young authors.

In his case, though, it took far fewer to hit the mark. Tarzan of the Apes, written when he was thirty-six years old, was only the third story Burroughs submitted for publication. It ran in full in the October 1912 issue of The All-Story, taking up virtually the entire magazine. The reception exceeded the wildest dreams of author and editors alike and triggered a phenomenon unprecedented in publishing history. Dazzled readers proclaimed Tarzan one of the best adventure tales ever and pleaded for more. And so Burroughs obliged: twenty-three more Tarzan novels over the next thirty years, plus another fifty non-Tarzans, including eleven set on Mars, six at the center of the Earth, and five on Venus. A formal accounting of Burroughs's total sales has never been made, but the most conservative estimate is thirty million books sold during his lifetime; a more generous tally is sixty million. Considering that Burroughs's titles have been published in more than thirty languages and given the broad circulation of his stories in magazines and comics, there can be little question that he was the most widely read American author of the first half of the twentieth century.

"I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or any other," he begins his chronicle of an orphaned child raised by apes. More truthfully, his tale was guided by a number of distinguishable sources, including the legend of Romulus and Remus, wild children of early Rome; Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves in Kipling's The Jungle Book; and travelogues of colonial Africa from the end of the nineteenth century. Burroughs had never heard of Rousseau's noble savage or Nietzsche's Übermensch, and though he owned a copy of Darwin's The Descent of Man, he never got much beyond sketching a monkey on the title page. Nevertheless, he had acquired a layman's grasp of one of the burning issues of the post-Victorian era--and for that matter, every period since. "I was mainly interested in playing with the idea of a contest between heredity and environment," he wrote in Writer's Digest twenty years after the first publication of Tarzan of the Apes.

"For this purpose I selected an infant child of a race strongly marked by hereditary characteristics of the finer and nobler sort, and at an age at which he could not have been influenced by association with creatures of his own kind I threw him into an environment as diametrically opposite that to which he had been born as I might well conceive." Baby Tarzan, as nearly everyone knows, grows up to become lord of the apes. He is a crafty woodsman and a silent stalker. His eyes, ears, and nose miss nothing. He "fills his belly by the chase" and prefers his meat raw. He backs down to neither man nor beast and does not recognize fear. "I know the word," he says in Tarzan and the Leopard Men, "but what has it to do with death?" Every Tarzan tale is full of stupendous action: mortal combat with apes and lions and breathtaking aerial traverses of the "middle terraces" of the African forest. In its sheer passion, Tarzan's yell, the victory bellow of the bull ape, is the supreme cri de coeur, and his romance with Jane is as primal and star-crossed as those of Romeo and Juliet or Beauty and the Beast.

But what many people forget--particularly those more familiar with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's and Johnny Weissmuller's film version of the Tarzan story--is that Tarzan, besides being king of the jungle, is also the son and rightful heir of England's Lord and Lady Greystoke, and in the final pages of Tarzan of the Apes, he must come to terms with his gentility. Loincloth, knife, and bow remain his preferred wardrobe, but he adjusts to tailored suits and cafe society with remarkable ease. In later episodes, he flies a plane, quotes Latin, and oversees English and African estates. Blood--in his case, blue blood--always tells, an axiom that Burroughs stresses in nearly all of his stories. In his sublime synthesis of nature and nurture, Tarzan is as timely as he is timeless. By the turn of the nineteenth century, America's idol of earthy virtue, the frontiersman, had been crowded out by the decadent city slicker and by a new class of immigrants, mostly Mediterranean and Eastern European, who, in contrast to the fin de siècle bourgeoisie, were deemed too uncouth, too thick-wristed to enrich the American commonweal.

Enter Tarzan, the embodiment of Teddy Roosevelt's "strenuous life," a latter-day Leatherstocking whose exuberant physicality and solid pedigree provided a welcome antidote to the mongrel modern age. And in short order, he became a superhero, the first pop icon to attain global saturation. As such, he was the forefather of Superman and more recent real-life marvels such as Michael Jordan. Before Tarzan, nobody understood just how big, how ubiquitous, how marketable a star could be. But while there can hardly be a person on the planet who has not heard of Tarzan, very few are familiar with Edgar Rice Burroughs. Most who recognize the stuffy triple name assume that, like Lord Greystoke, he must be British, when in fact he was a native of Chicago and the founder of--what else?--Tarzana, California. Despite his enormous appeal, his work is not taught in schools or welcomed in the American canon; as a result, only diehard Burroughs buffs--most of whom cherish their collections of Burroughs books and memorabilia like splinters from the true cross--have any feel for the clever and complex creator of the century's most popular hero.

One reason for Burroughs's undeserved ostracism is the stigma attached to pulp fiction. According to the laws of the cultural jungle, writers like Hemingway or Fitzgerald are literary lions; Burroughs and other paid-by-the-word authors of science fiction, westerns, whodunits, and romantic confessionals are monkeys with typewriters--hacks. Burroughs pretended not to mind his lowbrow status. "I don't think my work is `literature,' I'm not fooling myself about that," he told the Los Angeles Times. Writers of his ilk, he volunteered with a shrug, belong "in the same class with the aerial artist, the tap dancer, and the clown." Even so, he tried again and again to break out of the pulp ghetto and place his stories in "slicks"--The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Collier's--where the money and prestige were better. Because of his low regard for his profession and because he had backed into it at such a late age, Burroughs was always uncomfortable with his accomplishments.

"If I had striven for long years of privation and effort to fit myself to become a writer, I might be warranted in patting myself on the back," he confessed to his brother George in 1929, "but God knows I did not work and still do not understand how I happened to succeed." Nevertheless, his imagination was evident from the start. He drew delightful caricatures and wrote clever verse as a young boy, creativity that was curbed by his short attention span and his unshakeable sense that he did not meet the standards of his father, Maj. George Tyler Burroughs, a well-to-do Civil War veteran. His academic record was erratic, demotions and dismissals negating any bursts of achievement. He won an appointment to West Point only to fail the entrance exam, and he never lasted long at jobs, even the ones at which he did well, such as supervising the stenography department at Sears, Roebuck. By the time he started writing in earnest, he did so more out of resignation than avocation. "I was sort of ashamed of it as an occupation for a big, strong, healthy man," he confessed.

To thrive in the pulp market, where a good rate was a penny a word, a natural flair for storytelling was essential. "Plots are in the air. All you have to do is reach out and take them," Burroughs said of his knack for spinning yarns with such apparent ease. But without his array of other talents, he might easily have failed. His energy was titanic, like that of his fictional heroes. In a morning, he could conjure and conquer entire worlds, pecking thousands of words or filling a half-dozen dictaphone cylinders, even with his children crawling at his feet and creditors buzzing around his ears. More remarkable still was his head for business. In 1923, he became one of the very first writers to incorporate, and over the years, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., grew into a complex organism. Most of his stories were first serialized in inexpensive magazines--known as pulps, for the low-grade paper on which they were printed. After that, they were published in book form. Then the "first edition" books became "popular" editions, or cheap hardcovers, the forerunners of paperbacks.

This progression was not unusual: most of Jack London's yarns of the Far North, Zane Grey's westerns, and H. Rider Haggard's African adventures also appeared in magazines before they became best-selling books. But in one very important respect, Burroughs was in a league all his own. In 1931, he grew weary of having to share his income with middlemen--"parasites," he called them--and began publishing his own books under the ERB, Inc., imprint. Still not content with the return on his creative capital, he struck deals to turn Tarzan into a radio show, a daily newspaper strip, a Sunday comic page, and, most lucrative of all, motion pictures. Though marketing experts and syndication agents warned that Tarzan on the radio would compete with Tarzan in the comics or that serial motion pictures would steal audiences from feature motion pictures, Burroughs was convinced that the total would exceed the sum of the parts.

As he saw it, there was no such thing as overkill, and well before Walt Disney ever hawked his first mouse ears or Ninja Turtle "action figures" became film stars, Burroughs was already a grand master of a concept that would one day be known as multimedia. He licensed Tarzan statuettes, Tarzan bread, Tarzan ice cream, bubble gum, bathing suits, and puzzles, and he founded a national network of Tarzan "clans" to convert American youth to the Tarzan way. Yet for all his ingenuity and diligence, too often his successes were offset by disappointment and liability. With only a couple of exceptions, he never did graduate from the pulps. He failed at two marriages and was obliged to subdivide his beloved Tarzana ranch, paving the way, literally and ironically, for a suburb of drive-ins, drive-throughs, and mini-malls. Despite his extraordinary popularity, he never made a killing on any one deal. Royalty checks came frequently, but they never amounted to more than a few thousand dollars. Even in years when his income exceeded one hundred thousand dollars--most years it was far less--his appetites and expenses always seemed to leave him cash poor.

He had a weakness for Thoroughbreds and fast cars, and after he met his second wife, Florence, he made the mistake of trying to keep pace with the spendthrift elite of Hollywood and Palm Springs. Nor did it help his pocketbook and peace of mind to be perennially repelling lawsuits, mostly disagreements over permissions and royalties, or making legal thrusts of his own. And through it all, he had mouths to feed. Florence and her two children were but his latest dependents; his own children, Joan, Hully, and Jack, were on the ERB, Inc., payroll for much of their adult lives, as were his alcoholic first wife, Emma, his daughter's deadbeat husband, Jim Pierce, and his trusted man Friday, Ralph Rothmund. Because of this relentless overhead, he could never afford to stop writing. The beast had to be fed constantly. Some years he wrote three or four hundred thousand words, four or five books' worth. Tarzan, naturally, was his mainstay; he averaged one a year. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the other fifty titles as chaff.

His painstakingly researched a pair of novels about the Apache warrior Shoz-Dijiji are noteworthy for their progressive characterization of Native Americans. The Girl from Hollywood, his autobiographical novel about a California ranch family ruined by booze, dope, and movieland promiscuity, is an equally fascinating cultural document. He may not have been the first writer to fantasize about Mars, but in light of recent astrophysical evidence suggesting that life might once have existed there, and NASA's pledge to one day land on its surface, Burroughs, who grew up in an era before airplanes or automobiles, deserves a salute for fanning the dream. It is true that some of his stories are duds. They suffer from continuity problems, and the gimmicks are threadbare. But considering how quickly he crafted his plots, most of them are amazingly tight and considered. He imbues each of his worlds, ape or alien, with what H. G. Wells called "practical incredibleness." Burroughs visualized them so completely, in fact, that he worked up maps of their kingdoms, sketches of their costumes, and alphabets and glossaries of their languages, including a comprehensive "Ape-English/English-Ape" dictionary.

He took particular care in the taxonomy of monsters and beasts: for instance, the cyclopean Plant Men of Mars have hair follicles "the bigness of a large angle-worm" and the nose of "a fresh bullet hole that had not yet begun to bleed." ("Of the few stories that I have had rejected," he told a fan, "grewsomeness [sic] was the principal cause.") In a typical Burroughs tale, the hero is a stranger in a strangeland--Tarzan in the jungle, John Carter on Mars, David Innes in the Inner World, Carson Napier on Venus. He is a warrior by both breeding and training. Repeatedly he is chased, outnumbered by savage hordes, and thrown into a "Stygian" cell of "Cimmerian" darkness. "Where there is life there is hope," exclaims John Carter when the going gets roughest, an optimism shared by all Burroughs protagonists. By application of brawn, brains, and valor, he eventually prevails over his adversaries and either makes his way home or else finds a new and better home.

Always, too, the leading man is called on to rescue a damsel in distress with whom he inevitably falls in love. Boy meets girl was hardly a new motif by the time Burroughs got around to employing it, though, remarkably, he was the first to introduce it to science fiction. (The subgenre would come to be labeled "scientific romance.") In most instances, the object of the hero's affections is well-born, beautiful, and though indubitably chaste, often provocatively clad--or in some instances, virtually unclad. Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars, parades through eleven novels seminude. "Entertainment is fiction's purpose," Burroughs insisted time and time again, and he pleaded innocent to "disseminating any great truths or spreading any sort of propaganda" in his stories. Glib demurrals aside, however, he frequently held forth, usually allegorically but sometimes quite overtly, on a wide range of political and social issues. His vicious attacks on Germany during World War I in Tarzan the Untamed and The Land That Time Forgot eventually cost him his lucrative German audience.

Infected by the postwar Red Scare, he railed against socialism at home and abroad in The Moon Maid and a number of other stories. All of his plots, especially the Tarzans, boil down to survival of the fittest, a theme both romantic and political. Burroughs, like so many of his contemporaries, believed in a hierarchy of race and class. In the Tarzan stories, blacks are generally superstitious and Arabs rapacious. On Mars, the races descend from a Tree of Life and, like fruit, are color-coded red, green, yellow, and black. Burroughs was obsessed with his own genealogy and was extremely proud of his nearly pure Anglo-Saxon lineage. He came from "good" stock, a critical ingredient for good standing, he asserted. Over time, his fervid appreciation of genetic predetermination led him to the radical fringe of Darwinism: eugenics. At one point, he even wrote a column for the Los Angeles Examiner calling for the extermination of all "moral imbeciles" and their relatives, a doctrine that would soon be trumpeted by Adolf Hitler.

In an unpublished essay, "I See a New Race," Burroughs offered his own Final Solution to the world's problems. But he was also canny enough to play both sides of the street. Even as he was stressing Tarzan's and John Carter's superior bloodlines, he honored the Algeresque notion of the common man pulling himself up by the bootstraps. In 1911, when he submitted his first story, A Princess of Mars, to the Munsey family of magazines, he chose the pen name Normal Bean to signify that he saw himself as just a regular fellow, a man of the people. On one hand, he assumed a certain aristocratic detachment from his work; on the other, he attributed his success to the fact that he shared "a common weakness with 120,000,000 other Americans." Not surprisingly, Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper was one of his favorite books, and he borrowed Twain's trick of role reversal in many of his own stories. Another mentor was Jack London, whose proletarian heroes survive more through grit than through grace.

No matter how well-born (or low) one might be, Burroughs realized, no one was perfect, least of all himself. "Are the heart and soul of man any better because of civilization," he asked, "or is the apparent betterment [of civilization] merely ... veneer?" Indeed, there were periods when Burroughs's blithe hauteur failed him entirely, when self-effacement edged toward self-loathing. One of the worst occurred in 1940 and 1941, after he and Florence moved to Hawaii. He had first brought her to Oahu on their honeymoon in 1935, after a delicate divorce from his first wife and a bizarre courtship; Florence, a former silent-movie actress, had been married to one of his business partners and trusted friends. When they returned in April 1940, they were accompanied by Florence's two children, Caryl Lee and Lee. Burroughs was turning sixty-five; his wife was half his age. Back in Los Angeles, they had been living far beyond his means, and he had exhausted himself trying to keep up with her. Once in Hawaii, though, his strength returned and his spirits improved.

As the celebrated master of Tarzan, he was welcomed by a loose fraternity of navy and army men with an unlimited quantity of booze on their hands. "All my plans for retiring into a hole and pulling the hole in after me have been shot to hell," he joked after one particularly enthusiastic run of revelry. "You just can't say no to the people over here." Florence, too, was a welcome addition to the mostly male gatherings, though to hear her tell it, her role soon devolved into chauffeuring her tipsy, sunburned husband home from luaus and wee-hour card games. If anything, she was having trouble keeping up with him. But while Hawaii provided a welcome change of scenery, it offered no escape. Between bridge, cocktails, and sunbathing, Burroughs still had to keep the pages coming. By the end of 1940, he had finished Mars, Inner World, and Tarzan manuscripts and was commencing a new Venus story. Over a period of ten days before Christmas, he wrote more than forty thousand words. That month, he, Florence, and the children had moved into the Niumalu Hotel in Honolulu, their third address since arriving in Hawaii.

They had their own bungalow and most of their neighbors were long-term residents. Still, it was by no means a proper home. The rooms were cramped, buggy, and damp, and the family took their meals communally in the hotel's dining room. By mid-March, Florence had had enough. On the fourteenth, she and the children sailed for California. Four months later, she would sue for divorce, citing mental cruelty. Her chief complaint was that Burroughs had made her feel old, or, contrarily, that because she was thirty years younger, he had made a show of acting more youthful, but had succeeded only in behaving childishly. She, however, was not entirely exempt from blame herself. Money was always an issue with her: the Ed Burroughs she had first been attracted to was a natty, venerable, and, she assumed, prosperous gentleman. According to Burroughs's allies, she was crestfallen when he informed her that they had to hold their expenses, including rent, to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, which was all the salary he was drawing from ERB, Inc., in 1941. With money, he was doubtless a father figure, potent and protective.

On a budget, he was just another bald, slightly overweight old man. Alone for the first time in forty years, Burroughs became a virtual shut-in, hiding behind the drawn blackout curtains of his Niumalu bungalow and talking to no one for days. An old bladder problem flared up, and he was hospitalized. He suspected he was dying. Somehow he managed to keep plugging away at The Wizard of Venus, though his introductory paragraph reads like a note in a bottle. "I believe it was [explorer and natural historian] Roy Chapman Andrews who said that adventures were the result of incompetence and inefficiency," the story's hero, Carson Napier, declaims. "If that be so, I must be the prize incompetent of two worlds; for I am always encountering the most amazing adventures. It seems to me that I always plan intelligently, sometimes over meticulously; and then up jumps the Devil and everything goes haywire. However, in all fairness, I must admit that it is usually my fault.... I am rash. I take chances. I know that that is stupid.

The thing that reflects most discredit upon my intelligence is the fact that oftentimes I know the thing I am about to do is stupid, and yet I go ahead and do it. I gamble with Death; my life is the stake." Burroughs was writing about the blunder that had first steered Carson Napier's spaceship in the direction of Venus, but he was also reflecting on his own decision to move to Hawaii, where his life was now very much in jeopardy. He might easily have perished in Honolulu if two events had not intervened. One was the arrival of his son Hully on an undisguised mission of mercy. The second was an event that changed millions of lives besides his own, though he was among the few who witnessed it firsthand. Unlike his fictional alter-egos, Burroughs had never been to war. He had been a cowboy and gold miner in Idaho and served in the United States Cavalry in Arizona. He had sailed through the Panama Canal, but never set foot in Africa, a continent he virtually owned in the popular imagination. He wrote about action, but his published words spoke louder than his own experience. "All the interesting things in my life never happened," he once confessed to an editor.

"I am always late for the thrill. I always get to the fire after it is out." Until Sunday, December 7, 1941. That morning, Burroughs and Hully woke early to play tennis but were distracted by the sound of what they believed to be antiaircraft practice. They soon learned the truth: the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor. That night, Burroughs and Hully patrolled the waterfront as volunteers in a civilian guard, and over the next four years, Burroughs made three trips to Pacific war zones and enjoyed the distinction of being the oldest American correspondent to cover World War II. His dispatches were not widely read, and he was far from a hero. Still, the tours of duty made up for a lot: his disillusionment as a cavalryman, his rejection by the Rough Riders in 1898, his relegation to the reserves during World War I, and the general sense of qualified achievement that had nagged him for most of his career. He had never explicitly yearned for his life to imitate his art; just the same, it finally did.

If writing Tarzan of the Apes had been the first big turning point in his life, World War II was the second and, in a way, it was the climax, as well. After the war, Burroughs returned to California, where he was at long last reunited with his children and grandchildren. He died not far from Tarzana in 1950, a relatively contented man. Fifty years later, the time has come to reappreciate this imaginative, vigorous figure who played such a crucial role in shaping the century now so near its close. The life of Edgar Rice Burroughs is a chronicle of personal highs and lows, successes and insecurities that faithfully mirror the aspirations and tensions of the society around him. To be sure, pop culture--books, magazines, movies, radio, comics--would have burgeoned without Burroughs; but as one of its most innovative and prolific contributors, he truly had a Tarzan-size impact. (C) 1999 John Taliaferro All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-684-83359-X ©2017 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

Disney's Tarzan Characters © Disney & Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Trademark Tarzan ®, Tarzan and Jane , John Carter of Mars , and Edgar Rice Burroughs  And Others Owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. ©2017 Tarzan trademarks Disney's Tarzan - Production Production The artists who made the creation a reality and the movie a memory. Disney's Tarzan Adventure: Two Worlds Merge By Joe Tracy Walt Disney Pictures Tarzan is the biggest Box Office success Disney's animation team has seen since The Lion King. What is it about this movie that is captivating children and adults? The majority of success can be placed with the entire animation team and the great job they did at bringing the story of Tarzan to lifeï¿½ at merging two worlds. From the daring decision to cut back on characters singing to the implementation of a new "deep canvas" technique, all the artists joined forces with one common focus ï¿½ the creation of a legendï¿½ The Creation of a Legend Disney's Tarzan story is based on a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs called "Tarzan of the Apes" that was published in 1914.

It quickly became a blockbuster best-seller. The story became so popular that between the time it was written and Disney's film was brought to life, there had already been 47 Tarzan movies. So what could Disney do that the other 47 films couldn't? Perhaps the grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs says it best: "When I saw the Disney film it was such a thrill to finally see my grandfather's characters portrayed as he truly wrote and described them in his books," says Danton Burroghs. "Having Tarzan interact with his ape mother is an amazingly touching scene and I was absolutely flabbergasted to see it visualized on the screen. The animators also captured my grandfather's ability to have Tarzan flying through the jungle's upper terraces. He [the grandfather] described these wonderful scenes where Tarzan would just leap and fly, grabbing branches wildly like in a tornado and Glen Keane [supervising animator of the Tarzan character] has captured that movement in his scenes." To appreciate the wonder of the entire creation, one must first step back and go to the beginning to discover how nurturing the creation with the Disney touch contributed to the artistry of the film.

Nurturing the Creation with the Disney Touch The director of Tarzan , Kevin Lima, was first approached to direct the movie in 1995 while he was still hard at work on A Goofy Movie. Before accepting the job, Lima read "Tarzan of the Apes" for the first time. As he read Burroughs' book, Lima came up with an visualization that he felt captured Tarzan's search for his own identity. It was the image of two hands held up against one another. Lima immediately knew that this Tarzan movie was the job for him. Many artist were brought together in 1995 to help realize the vision of bringing the Tarzan creation to life. Among them was screenwriter Tab Murphy, who wrote Gorillas in the Mist and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Murphy was responsible for writing the first several treatments of Tarzan. Then Bob Tzudiker and Noni White (The Lion King and The Hunchback of Notre Dame ) were brought on board to bring a family and emotional focus to the film as well as giving each of the characters definition. Comedy writer Dave Reynolds then was brought on board to add humorous dialogue to the film.

That job took Reynolds over a year to accomplish! The whole team, however, faced one major dilemma from the beginning. Which part of the Tarzan story should they focus on? "When we first began looking at the book, we asked ourselves 'what do we want to say that's different from what other Tarzan movies have said,'" recalls Lima. "One of the things that we thought we could do, which is very relevant today, is explore the idea of family. What constitutes a family? Is it those that you look like or those that you love? We also decided that we wanted the animals to talk. Audiences go to movies to get a glimpse of another world, so why show them a world they already know? They can turn on the Discovery Channel and watch gorillas in a natural habitat. We wanted to give them something different and something that only animation could deliver." Tarzan producer Bonnie Arnold emphasizes the importance the team placed on the relationships in the film. "We decided early on that the relationship between Tarzan and Kala was going to be of primary importance. The close bond they share is the heart of our story.

Showing what happened in his childhood that would affect his whole life was a significant piece of the story puzzle." That significant piece of the story puzzle became one of the greatest Disney animated openings ever, topped only by The Lion King . But even a strong opening didn't help what seemed to be a rushed ending. There was even respectable disagreement among the artists as to how Tarzan should end. "The big question mark from the start was the ending," says Murphy [the original screenwriter of Tarzan]. "In the book, the third act essentially takes place outside the jungle. I was in favor of Tarzan leaving and having him go to England. That's how I wrote the first draft of the script. From the very beginning Kevin [Lima] and Chris [Chris Buck, who also directed Tarzan], believed that the story lost some of its magic if we left the jungle. I think it was a process we had to go through to find out that the story would be better served by keeping it in the jungle.

The great thing about working for Disney is that if you believe in an idea, in the early stages, you have time to explore and try things that may ultimately fail." In order for an animation to succeed, it must have a good story to go along with quality animation. While the Disney Feature Animation team had the Edgar Rice Burroughs story of Tarzan, they still had to personalize itï¿½ give it that Disney touch. "A good story is always going to have great characters first and then something that touches or moves you," says Brian Pimental, Tarzan's head of story development. "This film also had to have comedy and action and all these elements had to somehow come together. The strongest parts for me are the emotional core. It's a part of Tarzan you've probably never seen before. In addition to interacting with his gorilla family, our Tarzan is different because he's very introspective. He knows what's going on and is aware of the world around him. He's not completely in control of everything. He's just trying to find a place where he feels comfortable with himself." Like all good stories, though, this one needed a dilemma. For this telling of Tarzan that dilemma came from deep within.

"One of the things we did in all of our brainstorming sessions with the writers was to try and come up with themes in everyday life that contemporary audiences could relate to," says Arnold (producer). "And the theme we kept coming back to was 'what defines a family?' Tarzan is really an adopted child. He's adopted by this ape family and grows up thinking that he's one of them. When he meets Jane and the other humans for the first time, his dilemma is what family does he really belong with. Is it the family that raised and nurtured him or the family that he was born into?" Of course, the creation of Tarzan didn't just happen overnight. It started with a crew, a book, and a destiny ï¿½ to bring the creation to lifeï¿½ Bringing the Creation to Life: Animating Tarzan One of the most important animation roles to film in Disney's Tarzan was that of the supervising animator for the Tarzan character. For that, Disney veteran Glen Keane was brought on board. Known as one of the top animators in the industry, Keane was given the task to make sure that Tarzan became a living breathing character with sincerity, depth, humor, and fluid movement.

"My first step in finding inspiration for the character was to go to the original source," says Keane. "The Tarzan described in Burroughs' book was incredible and nothing like the one I've seen in the Hollywood films. This Tarzan moves like an animal. He's a genius of adaptation. He takes a movement from a leopard or a gibbon. He can imitate the movement of a serpent. Burroughs describes him as being able to spring 20 feet at a stretch. No human could do that, but an animated Tarzan certainly could." Keane came up with the idea of having Tarzan "surf" the trees, much like a surfer or skateboarder. "The more I thought about it, the more it just seemed to work with the moss-covered trees," he says. The directors loved the idea. Tarzan would build his own "freeway" system among the trees. Even so, there was another hurdle to overcome to help with the drawings. Exactly what was going on in Tarzan's head? The answer was discovered when Keane and his son took a trip to Africa in the fall of 1996.

"Before I went to Uganda to observe the mountain gorillas, I couldn't understand how Tarzan would have to struggle with the idea of leaving the jungle to be with Jane," says Keane. "Given a choice between these gorillas and this beautiful girl, the choice didn't seem too difficult. But watching a family of gorillas in their natural habitat gave me a whole new perspective. I was struck with the love these animals have for each other. They live in this beautiful paradise and there was something wonderful about being under the protection of this big silverback gorilla. Life was simple and fun. I didn't want to leave there myself." Keane did return to pass on that inspiration to a group of 13 top character animators at the Disney Paris Studio. They're job ï¿½ bring Tarzan to life with all the right emotions, drive, and dilemmas to make him a strong character. Beyond Tarzan While Tarzan was the central character in the film, it took a group of Disney's top supervising animators and hundreds of character animators to bring the entire environment of characters to life.

Brought on for the supervising task of Jane was Ken Duncan who was the supervising animator for Meg, the female lead in Disney's Hercules. "For me, Jane was really an innocent character with a lot of energy and a tendency to say what's on her mind," says Duncan. "In the beginning she has all these fantasies about what Africa is going to be like and when she gets there, she discovers that there's mud and dirt and some rude baboons. It's a bit different than she imagined." Another challenging job was the supervising of all the lead animal characters. To do it, Russ Edmonds, the lead animator of the horse Philippe in Beauty and the Beast was brought on board. For Tarzan, his job was to breathe life into Kala, Tarzan's ape mother. "We didn't want Kala to look like a person in a gorilla suit," says Edmonds. "We wanted her to look and move like a real gorilla. She walks on her knuckles and she doesn't swing from trees, because gorillas are too heavy to do thatï¿½ My challenge was to keep her alive and make each scene seem fresh and different.

This was the most subtle animation I've ever done, but it was possible to get a lot of expressions in her face. If you watch her face, you can see all the expressions in her large brow." From Tarzan to Kala and Jane to Terk, each supervising animator and teams of character animators faced the challenge of making their creations realistic, alive, and believable. Of course, part of the belief of what a person is watching comes from the background scenes and interaction of characters with those scenes. For this, Disney had a trick up its sleeve. A new process that Disney dubbed "Deep Canvas." The Birth of Disney's Deep Canvas Technique Traditionally, animation has existed in a two-dimensional world. Characters created on paper are photographed one frame at a time against flat hand-painted backgrounds. Walt Disney and his technical team tried to add dimension to the process as early as the 1930s with the multiplane camera. The next real innovation came in the mid-1980s with new technological innovations and the introduction of computers. By 1991, Disney was able to create dimensional moving backgrounds like the swirling ballroom in Beauty and the Beast .

Other notable Disney milestones include the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King, the sweeping camera movements and crowd scenes in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the powerful attack by an army of Huns in last years' Mulan. With Tarzan, artistry and technology blend as never before with the introduction of a new breakthrough technique called "Deep Canvas." The filmmakers' desire to integrate Tarzan into his jungle environment led to this exciting development and opened up a world of possibilities. Deep Canvas required a closer collaboration with a variety of different departments (layout, scene planning, background) and, most importantly, put the technology into the hands of the artists themselves. So how was the theory behind Deep Canvas born? As one of Disney's veteran layout supervisors, Dan St. Pierre had long been frustrated by the limitations of his medium. He felt that there must be some way to add greater depth to animated films and integrate the characters into the backgrounds. While finishing up his assignment in Paris on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, St. Pierre had an opportunity to express his views to Peter Schneider, then-president of Disney Feature Animation. Schneider was intrigued by St. Pierre's comments and agreed to let him take his theories to the next step.

This required a significant commitment to research and development as well as major expenditures for new computer equipment. St. Pierre tenaciously pursued his ideas for "Deep Canvas" in his new role as art director on Tarzan and enlisted the support of CG (computer graphics) supervisor Eric Daniels to help make it a reality. Daniels and his team of digital production software experts -- Tasso Lappas and George Katanics -- were willing experimenters and set about making St. Pierre's vision a reality. "The world of Tarzan takes place in what we call the 'ultimate jungle,'" says St. Pierre. "We took the best parts of jungles from around the world, including the ones that we visited in Africa, and pumped up the scale to create a larger-than-life place for Tarzan to live in. It has elements of fantasy but it's based on real plants and trees. We had to play with the size of plants to try and decorate the landscape and keep it elegant and organic. The result is heightened naturalism." What the Deep Canvas technique allowed the artists to do was take the "camera" and move it like you would with a live action film. The camera could follow characters while adding depth and strong movement to the film.

"One of the most unique things about Deep Canvas is that it enables these wonderfully trained traditional background painters to create entire environments instead of just flat square pieces of art," says St. Pierre. "The software we created allows them to paint with a stylus and a digitizing tablet on a three-dimensional model. It feels very much like they're doing a normal painting only they're reaching back to paint a distant mountain top or reaching forward to paint a foreground object. Their brushstrokes fly back in space and sort of stick onto the object that they were painting on." Even though the Deep Canvas technique changed many aspects of traditional animation, it was still embraced by those artists. "The idea of actually being able to paint a background that can be animated and seen from all different sides in a three-dimensional form is like a dream," says Doug Ball, head of backgrounds for the film. "People who have practically no experience with computers have dived into the program and within weeks were painting as prolifically as they were with traditional painting tools." Even with the Deep Canvas technique, many traditional animation elements were still applied to Tarzan. This included things like: - Shadows wrapping around characters and moving across their faces to suggest the canopy of plants and trees above.

- The generous use of dappled light also added a sense of realism. - Overlays of plants covering feet to make it feel like the characters were wading through the jungles. This stitched them credibly into the scene. From three spots across the world (California, Florida, and Paris), teams of animators, designers, artists, and filmmakers brought a vision to life. They merged the worlds of Tarzan and animation into one to create a lively and fun adventure for the whole family. In the end, it is Tarzan's world that we come to appreciate as one man with two worlds faces his ultimate destiny.

Question: Who wrote the Tarzan books?
Answer: Edgar Rice Burroughs